Amazon, Createspace And When Customer Service Goes Heroic

So my third serious novel, Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy is only available online, there's no Middle East edition. Don't you just loathe people who start sentences with 'so'? Me too.

You can buy Shemlan as a paperback from Amazon.com (and the various Amazon dots), Barnes and Noble, The Book Depository or order it from any independent bookshop in the world by citing the ISBN number 978-1493621934.

It's a rather smashing book. I strongly suggest you do one of the above. The kitten might just make it through, see? This here handy link to the buy links for the book shows you where to get it as a paperback, Kindle ebook, Nook, on your iPad or, in fact, as any other ebook reader format ebook. But the paperback can be yours wherever you live, from Alaska to Kamtchatka. The Book Depository even ships it FREE OF CHARGE!

Do it now, you'll feel better. It's okay, I can wait. Here: I'll even do a reminder link.

Right? Great, thanks. Anyway, the reason you can buy Shemlan as a paperback anywhere in the world is because of a clever little Amazon owned operation called Createspace. Createspace allows authors to mount their book online and then prints out books to order using POD technology - Print (or Publish) On Demand. So they put an ISBN number in one end and a printed paperback with a nice glossy cover filled with wonderful words comes out, gets put in a shipping box, addressed to you and arrives a day or so later.

So when you hit that 'buy' link on Amazon or any other serioo book website, Createspace prints your book to order and despatches it to you.

A POD book is barely different enough from a booky book printed on novel paper for most readers to notice a difference. The quality is just fine.

It's all pretty marvellous, really.

However, there's trouble in paradise. People in the UAE hate buying books online - and Amazon hates selling ebooks to the Middle East. So most people don't bother buying the thing, they wait for me to have stock and buy 'em direct from me or just don't bother at all. For this reason - including a couple of upcoming events I'm doing - I bought 20 from Createspace earlier this year. They're more expensive to print than booky books, no surprises there, really, and so cost about Dhs30 a copy landed. That's too expensive to make traditional book distribution make any sense, 'cos disties take 50% and so with a cover price of Dhs60 dufus here doesn't make any money. Not, incidentally, that I have to. But I sell 'em direct and at signings and so on.

My books never turned up. I kept popping up at Sharjah Post Office so full of hope and optimism it was starting to remind me of back in the day when I used to go there to pick up the inevitable wodge of rejection slips. Months passed. Nada.

So I eventually told Createspace about it this week. And within the hour they'd mailed me back, said terribly sorry and promised to ship me a replacement batch out priority. I have to admit, I was impressed.

But that was nothing to how I felt today when DHL rocked up at the office with a box of 20 books. They DHLed them to me! How beyond the call of duty is that? I got my 20 books FOUR days later!

I emailed them to say thank you. They mailed back:

It is because of comments like yours that we strive to be the very best. Thank you for your very kind feedback! Without members like you, we could not continue to provide the service you have come to expect from us.

Your comments are greatly appreciated, and I sincerely thank you for choosing us for your self-publishing needs.  

Best regards,

Abu-Bakr
CreateSpace Member Services

Now you might call me easily impressed, but I'm blown away. Totally. I'm grinning like a Cheshire Cat who's just done a major hit of Amyl and found out in that very instant he's won the Lotto and Kate Bush is coming to tea naked.

If you want to buy a book, BTW, be my guest! Just hit me up at the usual @alexandermcnabb. I'm off to see if I can eat dinner with this grin in place.

Book Post: I Love Book Clubs

(Photo credit: MEGATOTAL)

It's getting busy with the LitFest around the corner, interviews here, blogposts there. Here's a LitFest blog post in which I answer the immortal question, "Can you teach someone to be a writer or is it an inherent quality?" among others!

I'm scheduled to talk at a school, moderate a session, participate in a panel and, as usual, sit in looming empty space next to someone like Eoin Colfer as he wrangles a signing line stretching to Ras Al Khaimah.

And, by sheer coincidence, I got invited to a book club meeting. Did I ever before mention I love book clubs? I did? Good. Because I do. Who else would buy things from you, invite you to their house/favourite coffee shop and ply you with hooch/coffee and food/cake whilst spending three hours talking to you about your favourite topics (in my case me and my books) and then thank you for coming?

It's insane.

I  attended a meeting of a book club in the Arabian Ranches last night. Ten members, all women, seemed to think they were a daunting sight, but you'd not have walked into a sea of friendlier faces in most pubs or gatherings.

There was quite a lot of curiosity. Do authors have Tourettes or anything like that? Should you feed them anything special in case they start biting book club members?

We sat around the table outside and chatted, mostly sort of Q&A. Everyone was very curious indeed. What started me writing? What does it take to write a book? How do you know you're any good at it and that sort of thing, but then we also started to look at characters, their motivations and what made them tick. The club had read Olives - A Violent Romance before, so I was expecting recrimination over the dirty thing I do at the start of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (the book the club has just finished reading) but everyone was very forgiving.

I got a hard time over whether Lynch is sufficiently realistic as an Oirish person, our hostess being a 'Dub' herself and therefore unwilling to let my 'Darby O'Gill' Norn Irish spy go without a spirited attempt at skewering me for getting it wrong. Luckily I had remembered to put a Magdalene Laundry and a paedophile priest into the mix and so managed to avoid being filleted. All you need to craft proper Irish characters are laundries and priests. And maybe the odd 'top of the mornin' to yer'.

Given my Mother In Law has read Beirut and responded with 'Fair play, Alexander,' no Irish person holds any fear for me. Lynch has passed muster with the heavyweights and we had a lot of fun with the whole thing. Mind you, if I'd been Joe O'Connor it would have been all 'Love the priest, Joe, ain't he gas?' and 'Great nun scene there, Joe. Don't ye love a nice nun?'

I noted I wasn't asked about my 'Hasn't Mary Got A Lovely Bottom' t-shirt...

Ah well, to be sure. A few remembered highlights, although there was a lot more in our conversation, including lots about my journey to publication, the state and nature of publishing in general and how publishers and Amazon respectively pay authors and that kind of thing...

Is Lynch's behaviour with Leila consistent with 'tradecraft'? 
Sure, did you ever see Lynch employing any conventional 'tradecraft' ever? He's a mess, a maverick product of the system gone irredeemably native. Lynch works because he understands the Middle East doesn't work, because he's more effectively hidden by being en clair than if he went around skuldugging.

Is he a rougher James Bond? 
No, he's the anti-Bond. He doesn't use gadgets beyond a memory key, he doesn't have Aston Martins, he uses servees shared taxis. He's not a loyal servant of the Crown, he's a dodgier proposition altogether. I guess that's why I like him.

How much research do you do? Like the Lebanese politics and the whizzbangs?
A whole load. You write from recollection, but you have to double check every recollected fact. In Olives, for instance, Paul remembers Joshua and the walls of Jericho as being from Joseph's Technicolour Dreamcoat. Now that was a flawed recollection and it would be valid for the character to have flawed recollection except it jars readers and they 'spot the mistake'. So you can't actually afford flawed recollection, someone, somewhere will have expertise in yachts (can the Arabian Princess really go from point a to point b in that time? Yes, I checked every sailing scrupulously for that very reason) or the Czech police (the cars are in their livery) or Oka warheads (they're real and yes, the Russians 'lost' about 180 of them) or how to kill a man with superb single grower extra brut champagne (I often check a bottle of Lamiable Extra Brut to ensure it hasn't lost its potency. No problem, I consider it a service to my readers).

Where did Gabe Lentini's 'castrato' voice come from?
My head. It just seemed fun to have a really burly tough guy speaking with Mickey Mouse's voice. It also helps to differentiate him as, as one club member pointed out, there is a quite stellar cast in Beirut and there are an awful lot of characters flying around at any given time.

Isn't Lynch rather, well, naíve at times?
He's certainly unconventional but I wouldn't call him naive. He sometimes takes the alternative road - the road less travelled - and it doesn't always work out for him. That's the problem with being a maverick. Most of the time, of course, it works brilliantly.

We wouldn't have read this if it hadn't been for Olives. It's outside our comfort zone.
A couple of members felt this, although most seemed not to. That's interesting, because Beirut seems to have attracted more female than male readers, which has surprised me. A couple of female reviewers have been clearly taken aback by the wanton violence and bad language in the book, but that's okay. I was taken aback writing it.

You kill an awful lot of people in this book...
Better out than in...

All your women have breasts.
Yup. Great, isn't it?

Is Michel Freij modelled on Saad Hariri?
Oh lord, no. He's mephistolean, that's all. He's modelled on a thousand over-privileged Lebanese sons of the terrible old men who have too much money and power. But on Hariri specifically or intentionally? Absolutely not.

Did I intend Beirut when I wrote Olives?
No. I had thought of an interlinear to Olives where I would take Paul to Beirut with Lynch looking after him and then manage the other side of Olives' story, Lynch's machinations. But then Beirut happened, mostly as a result of a dream that became the Hamburg scenes in the book and it took off from there. The Olives screenplay, titled When The Olives Weep which I've finished, tells more of that 'other story' than the book - necessarily, because of the way film works. At least, the way I think film works!

Are you doing another Lynch book?
I wouldn't say no, but my next project, whatever it is, won't be one. Maybe in the future. There's a Lynch short story out there somewhere, but I'll tell you about that later.

And so we went on into the night. I had a lovely evening and tried to answer every question or point as honestly and interestingly as I could. As usual, it's shocking how much people invest in a book, how much care they put into your work. And it's always so nice to be answerable to them. Honestly.

GeekFest. The Wrap.

The 3D printer printed, the talkers talked, the Oculus Rift immersive 3D gaming experience thingy was too scary for me to try out and Jay Wud played a glorious gig much, one suspects, to the unease of the various residents of Emaar's Downtown district. The sound splashing back from the surrounding expensive high rise was a strange demonstration of wave theory. I bet he's never played to a grassy sward scattered with geeks sprawled on bean bags before.

I got a 3D printed penguin from Jackys' Ashish Panjabi (a clearly unkind reference to the DJ I wore to host the t-break gaming and technology awards) which I find unreasonably cool. Grumpy Goat got his copy of Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy which appeared to make him happy (you owe me Dhs60, ya goat) and we all got to meet loads of people we haven't seen in ages - but see online every day.

Huge thanks to Nick Rego for organising the Oculus thingy as well as the stupid cartoon game that had a small crowd enraptured for the whole evening, as well as to the chaps from Eureeca, Sekari, the most laudable Sameness Project and Nabbesh - it was nice to see the Sameness Project folks, Eureeca and Nabbesh all work out they might have business together. Thanks, too, to Uber for the Dhs100 limo vouchers, although I'm not sure how many people actually used them.

DSF's Market Out of The Box (Market OTB) container-based alternative marketplace continues through this week and I do recommend a visit - there is much funkiness to be found there. Baker and Spice's pumpkin quiche is quite, quite ridiculously good.

There are no plans to do it again, but Saadia had a nasty gleam in her eye as we parted. She is small and I find myself all too easily bullied by small people.

Book Post: Meeting The Great Unwashed

Olives for Sale! Who IS this Andy McNab,
anyway? (Photo credit: Bibi)

I'll start off with a huge thanks to the expatwoman.com team, who were kind enough to suggest I came to their 'Big Day Out' event at the Arabian Ranches Polo Club and flog my books. I confess at some considerable trepidation about the whole stunt and last night was - something I don't often experience - genuinely nervous.

I've never before sat behind a table full of my books and attempted to sell them. It was a very odd feeling indeed to begin with. I mean, what do you do with yourself? Do you stand to attention and appear keen and approachable? Do you take a seat and finish rereading John Le Carré's excellent and vastly underrated 'The Night Manager'? Do you ignore people and let them select what they want or leap on them and punch them until they buy the damn books?

It felt like a reality show challenge. What a great idea. Take a bunch of people who've written books and then hone their authorial talents until one of them wins through. Like Authonomy with a real prize at the end sort of thing. One of the challenges would surely be to man a stall selling your books for a day.

I got mistaken for Andy McNab twice. The first one was the funniest. He was clearly someone's dad out for a winter break.

"You were on the radio the other day, weren't you?"
"Yes, I was."
"Funny that, you not being able to read until you were twenty."
"What radio station were you listening to?"
"LBC."
"No, I'm on Dubai Eye. You're thinking of Andy McNab, aren't you? The SAS bloke?"
"Yes."
"That's not me."
"Who are you then?"
"Move on before I punch you."

I watched people passing all day, the way they scanned the books. Brits in particular are scared to catch your attention, eye contact makes them nervous and defensive until they've decided they might be interested. Once I'd finished my Le Carré and actually started talking to people I was feeling better about the whole thing and making sales, but every single sale of the day's 25-odd was a 'sale' rather than a 'this looks interesting, I think I'd like to buy it' approach. I worked hard for every man Jack of 'em. Imagine in a bookshop where I'm NOT there to bug them!!!

I'd do my POS differently next time and have a big sign saying I AM THE AUTHOR OF THESE BOOKS AND WILL SIGN THEM IF YOU BUY THEM. I might even have to wear it instead of my 'Doesn't Mary have a lovely bottom' Father Ted T-shirt which did, however, attract great attention. It's amazing how people don't make such small cognitive leaps.

People scan across the covers of books as they walk by, a clear 'I'm not in the market for a book today' decision going on. The vast majority of people simply walked by without a glance or darted a cursory gaze of absolute disinterest. Maybe if I'd coated the bloody things in chocolate.

I had a single copy of Shemlan, which the vice-consul from the British embassy in Abu Dhabi bought early on. They were, incidentally, doing a great job of outreach - the idea being to inform expats of the legal 'issues' here before they fall foul of the law. "Excuse me, are you a Brit? Do you have a liquor license?" We chatted a bit about dips and the scandalous Tom Fletcher, Our Man In Beirut. (whose mission I have so mischaracterised in my books!)

Most of those who stopped ended up buying and most of those bought both Olives and Beirut. A few preferred Kindle, but most were paperback addicts. All of the Lebanese required some sort of assurance that I lived in Lebanon or knew it. Magda Abu-Fadil's Huffpo review to hand, I was able to quell their unease quickly enough.

"The author has an uncanny understanding of the country's dynamics and power plays between the belligerent factions, post-civil war of 1975-1990.... Beirut is a gripping, fast-paced exciting book that may well jar Lebanese and others familiar with the city and its heavy legacy. But it's a must read.

Magda Abu-Fadil writing in The Huffington Post 

See what I mean? It's a neat answer to 'but how can you write about Beirut if you're not Lebanese or haven't lived there?' Glad I had that printed out along with some other choice reviews.

Nobody haggled. It was a binary decision. I want to buy a book or I don't. Everyone wanted them signed. Everyone was kind, interested and genuinely surprised to meet an author together with his books.

Beirut attracted the most attention, the body language the same every time there was a double take and a move towards the book - everyone picks and flips, the blurb is SO important once your cover image and title have done their job. But that high impact cover image, the lipstick bullet, together with the strong all-caps title. You could see it was clearly hitting people in a way Olives doesn't.

As they flip, so I start talking. They're on the hook and need to be landed. I was amazed at the flip - something I have catered for in my covers and blurbs (since Olives, which was self indulgent of me but I still love the art of it, while recognising it's not a 'commercial' cover - I'm actually on the hunt for a new cover image that'll fall in line with the 'look and feel' of Beirut and Shemlan), practised and evangelised in workshops but never actually observed in large crowds.

Recounting a summay of the story of Olives gave people more pause for thought than Beirut - Beirut was an easier book to characterise and 'get across' to people. But a few were more than taken with the idea of a 'violent romance' which was nice.

I would suggest this to every and any author - traditionally published or self published alike. Do this. Spend a day in a market selling your books. Initially daunting, it's an amazing way to meet people and see how they react to books and the idea of books, how they approach buying books and what makes them tick in that process. And what it is about YOUR books they like!

Weary, sunburned and clutching a Martini (natch), looking back on the day, the wealth wasn't in the little wad of money in my wallet. It was learning about those annoying carbon based lifeforms we depend upon to buy our books - the Great Unwashed. And bless 'em, one and all!

Book Post: Interviews And Big Days Out

There's an interview with li'l ole me over at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature blog, if you're interested in reading interviews with me. If not feel free to skip clicking on this link to the LitFest blog!.

Tellingly, my original answer to the question "What got you interested in writing?" was "I suppose it all started with reading, I’ve always been a voracious reader. But I gave up smoking in 2001 and had to find something publicly acceptable to do with my hands."

The LitFest team thought that was a tad controversial and omitted it from the final interview. That's okay with me, although I think it is possible to be a little too fastidious in these liberal days of ours. We all decide where we want to fight our battles and what we're comfortable with.

As we're talking about links to book stuff, I can't remember sharing this, although it's been up for a while now, but here's a piece on the Bubblecow blog about my journey to self publishing. It's a question I get asked quite a lot, one way or another. Bubblecow, BTW, is a leading British editorial consultancy and it was them what edited Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy for me.

Another link in a post of links is to the Expatwoman Big Day Out, which takes place tomorrow from 10.30am at the Arabian Ranches Polo Club. I'll be there signing - and hopefully even selling - books so do feel free to drop by and say hello, hurl abuse or whatever floats your boat. I'll have paperbacks of Olives and Beirut, but sadly have now run out of my little store of Shemlan paperbacks and have to order more from CreateSpace. So far I haven't missed the pleasure of paying a print bill at all, thank you!

And, finally, here's a link to buy your very own paperback or ebook of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. I mean, it wouldn't be a book post if I didn't end it with that, would it?

Book Post: Twits

(Photo credit: sharnik)

People's approach to censorship is strange. In a country that brought in copies of '50 Shades of Grey' I had someone concerned at my answer to an interview question, "Why did you start writing?" to which I responded, "I gave up smoking in 2001 and needed to find something publicly acceptable to do with my hands".

They weren't sure whether that could run or not.

The discussion started off today's Twitter Book Club meeting. We talked about Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy, of course - but also Olives and Beirut.

What made you focus on Shemlan - how had you found out about MECAS and its role in the little village? 
I'd known about it for years, but only relatively recently found it becoming an itch I had to scratch, buying up esoteric books about MECAS and others peripheral to it but which mentioned the Centre, including Ivor Lucas' memoir of an unexceptional life of a diplomat, which was to inform much of Jason Hartmoor's backstory. And then, of course, I had to go up there - a first visit with pal Maha found the centre, subsequent visits saw me lunching like a little pasha with friends at the glorious Al Sakhra (Cliff House) restaurant which is so central to the plot of the book. It is a truly beautiful place, BTW...

Olives was a novel whereas Beirut and Shemlan went more robustly down the Tom Clancy route. Guilty as charged, but I think (IMHO) Shemlan is more nuanced and closer in spirit to Olives than Beirut.

How can Lynch kill a trained killer with his bare hands? 
He gets lucky a couple of times, that's all. He's not fit and drinks too much. In fact, Lynch drinks when he's happy and drinks when he's sad. At least he's given up the fags.

Where did you get Gerald from? 
He was the result of a meeting I had with a prominent businessman who gave me the "I've been 20 years escaping being Gerry" line. I left the meeting punching the air as I built my spy in Olives around that memorable quote - a negation of a humble Irish upbringing.

Will there be more Lynch books? 
Not right now, not the next book. But possibly in the future. He was never actually meant to be in Shemlan, he gatecrashed it. I don't know how the book would have turned out if he hadn't.

Why do you do messy murders of characters we like? 
Because I can. I'm laughing when I do it. I enjoy the idea that I can, occasionally, shock my readers. If you're not expecting it, the unexpected can be quite a powerful thing - particularly when books follow a 'formula'.

Lynch. He's an SOB in Olives, a hero figure in Beirut and a nice guy in Shemlan. 
Not sure about nice guy, but as I've often said, Olives is told in the first person by the young man who Lynch is blackmailing. He's hardly about to tell us what a great guy our Gerald is. In all three books, Lynch is a self-serving maverick who does his own sweet thing but manipulates and bullies those around him to get results.

Olives and the narrative arc. Is Paul too passive? 
I've just finished writing the screenplay for Olives, which I've given When The Olives Weep as a working title, and it's been a fascinating exercise. And it's shown me there's a clear narrative arc in there, it's just not obviously based on the compelling need of one character and that characters odyssey to fulfil that need. Paul is a more passive player, but he still embarks on a journey to fulfil his purpose. It's just he doesn't know what it is. His confusion shouldn't hide the fact he's got to act to get though all this.

And he makes choices we think we would be better than to make. 
Sure, which is what I set out to do with the book. We all like to think we'd be altruistic and heroic and not weak or vacillate when the chips are down. Which is where we're kidding ourselves.

How long did Shemlan take to write? 
It was done in two tranches - about halfway finished (but relatively clearly plotted) when I published Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and finished subsequent to that. The last portion of the book  the Estonian scenes especially, was finished at incredible speed as I smashed away at the keyboard with my Bose Wife Cancelling Headphones pumping high volume death metal straight into my cortex. It took a bit of editing afterwards, but it was really fun to write.

We talked about more, of course, lots more: about my rejections and why I finally turned my back on 'traditional' publishing and let my agent go, about characterisation and the body count in Shemlan, about selling books, online and offline distribution and about what I'm up to next. We talked a lot about the souq in Aleppo and how beautiful it was in a very in your face sort of way and how it had, eventually after much soul searching, to find its way into the book untouched by the war that, of course, has utterly destroyed the huge Ottoman maze that was the world's largest covered souq and one of its oldest. Well, at least I did...

As always, great fun. I love book clubs.

Book Post - A Truckle Of 'Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy' Trivia

For no particularly good reason, a handful of things you probably didn't know (or even want to know) about Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. Which is a book I've written. Don't know if I mentioned that before or not...

The wooden Estonian orthodox church is real
Dennis Wye meets Jaan Kallas outside a wooden church with an ageing congregation. It's real, down near the port in Tallinn (just across the road, in fact, from the Museum Of Soviet Uselessness) and rather beautiful. It's one of few surviving churches in Tallinn - Estonia seems quite proud of being the most secular country in Europe and most churches have been deconsecrated and are being used as concert halls or Irish pubs. Hence the ageing congregation. The music in these churches, by the way, is beautiful and forms a connection to the Syrian Urfalee church.

So's the ice road
And you genuinely are told not to wear a seat belt and to travel within the minimum and maximum speed limit for fear of creating resonance and cracking the ice.

Marwan Nimr is back
He was inspired by a box of fruit. There's a company that airfreights fruit out of Lebanon called 'Marwan' and its logo is a little dakota-like aeroplane whizzing through the air. And so Marwan Nimr was born. He makes a cameo in Shemlan - having survived Beirut - and he's not best pleased with our Gerald.

Talking of cameos...
Lamiable extra brut champagne makes a brief appearance, following its excellent debut in Beirut. It's actually hard to make great extra brut champagne (with little or no added sugar, or 'dosage', it's easy to make sour extra brut, hard to make flinty, dry but rounded extra brut) The family that produces this exquisite single grower grand cru champagne appear to have forgiven me for using their delicious product to kill a chap in Beirut. I know they've read it because their UK importer sent them the relevant passage. Snitch.

The Puss In Boots
Marcelle's rather outré establishment in Monot, Le Chat Botté, is actually named after a Belgian hotel I stayed in as a kid. It just seemed like a good name and I've always liked that Marcelle insists on using its French name rather than the English version. How very Lebanese, darling!

Lance Browning
The nature of Lance Browning's fate and the fact he works for a certain bank are by no means intended to be some sort of revenge on my bank and certainly not written with ferocious relish. I can state that categorically.

The baddies are really bad...
The Ühiskassa, the umbrella organisation of the Estonian mafia is real, although apparently less active these days than in its heyday before Estonia's accession to the European Union.

The goodies are hardly better - and no, the whole CIA scheme in the book is by no means far fetched
In fact, the precise scheme they're up to in Shemlan is documented as having been seriously evaluated as an operation by the CIA. There are many recorded instances of US intelligence having become involved in the international arms and drugs trades, including the ill-fated Iran contra scandal, as well as money laundering drug related funds. So now you know...

You can buy the book here. 

There's also more stuff about the book and the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies there, too!

Book Post: Shemlan, Newgale, Pembrokeshire And Floods

Jason Hartmoor has been alive a little over an hour. He has recovered from his recurring nightmare and turned the damp side of his pillow to face the mattress. He luxuriates in the bright light streaming through the window overlooking the sea. It takes up most of the length of the room.

The bed sheets are white and crisp. Every opening of the eyes is a bonus, a thrill of pleasure. Sometimes he tries to stave off sleep, lying and fighting exhaustion until the early hours. It is becoming increasingly hard to push back the darkness. These days he’s lucky to hold out beyond midnight.

Throwing the lightweight duvet aside, he pauses for breath before sliding himself into a sitting position, looking out over Newgale’s glorious sandy mile, the breakers cascading. The dots of shivering early surfers bob in the glistening waves.

The pain starts to creep back, like a slinking dog.

He stands by the window, gazing out over the hazy beach, the fine misty spray thrown up by the incoming tide. His face in the morning light is lined and wan, pain etched into his still-handsome features, a face that would seem haughty but for the humour in the blue eyes nestled in the bruised-looking shadows. His hair is white, his forehead prominent and his nose aquiline. He draws himself up unconsciously; the slight puff of his chest brings a twinge of discomfort.
From Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy

What's the connection between the Lebanese mountain village of Shemlan and the Pembrokeshire coast? Absolutely none, unless you count me. Retired diplomat Jason Hartmoor was always going to have holed up either in Newgale or Pendine, it was touch and go which until I actually started writing the words above. I just wanted a long beach.

I spent many idyllic childhood holidays just around the corner from Newgale, the family stayed in the village of Pen Y Cwm (Welsh for 'top of the valley') and we'd often walk over the headlands to the village shop. When the tide is low you can walk from the beach at the end of the valley to Newgale, a mile and more of golden strand stretching out before you and a huge sea wall of slithering grey sea-worn stones protecting the pub and campsite that, apart from a handful of houses scattered on the hillside, make up Newgale itself.

The recent bad weather in the UK saw the Pembrokeshire coast taking something of a battering and Newgale was no exception: for the first time in living memory, that huge mound of stones was breached by the tide and wind-blown sea, flooding the campsite and pub beyond.

My parents never lost their love of this majestic coast and - arguably too late in life - chose to move there in their retirement. It was more my father's choice, he had a hankering to live by the sea. They ended up inland, a little down the road from Newgale and so we travel there frequently enough. The beach remains a favourite walk and yes, even in the winter months that mercilessly cold grey sea is dotted with the figures of surfers. I've always thought them quite, quite mad.

Anyway, as you travel uphill out of Newgale towards Pen Y Cym and Solva there's a bungalow with blue windows. Stand below it and look out across the vast expanse of shining sand at low tide and you'll see the view Jason took in on the day he pushed his x-rays into the kitchen dustbin and trundled his wheelie bag out to the taxi on his way to Beirut and his date with destiny...

Book Post - Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy On Da Radio

From 11am tomorrow, Dubai Eye Radio's regular Saturday book programme, Talking of Books, will be featuring Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy in its 'Book Champion' slot, in which one of the team proposes a book they think the world should go out and buy and read right now.

I mean, you can only agree with such exquisite taste, can't you?

I'll be joining them on the 'phone at around 11.40am to talk about the book and answer questions. Coming on the back of a 'red eye' flight home, the slot may well feature a sleep deprived maniac babbling absolute rubbish about books, spies and the like and so should at least be entertaining from that point of view.

If you haven't got around to buying your copy yet, here's a handy link to the various online stores who'll sell you an ebook or printed copy.

It'll be my first real public grilling about the book (the Twitter Book Club meeting on the 18th will be a chance for a real eyeball to eyeball encounter with readers) by people wot has read it, so I'm looking forward to finding out what they thought and what questions it left 'em with. I bet we'll be talking about MECAS and George Blake, Kim Philby and the like but you never know. There's plenty else to chat about, from the Lebanese Civil War through Aleppo's destroyed souk to driving across the frozen Baltic.

If you're not UAE based, you can catch the interview streaming online (about 7am onwards UK time, about 9am Beirut time) on this here handy link. Alternatively, you can use this information to neatly avoid the encounter.

What larks!

Book Post: The Displaced Nation

It's quite a neat title for an expat blog, isn't it? The Displaced Nation is a blog that ties together people from all over the world who have decided to live, well, all over the world. It shares the experiences and tales of people who have decided to leave the comfort of hearth and home and live somewhere alien, foreign and different.

I can imagine nothing more fun than alien, foreign and different.

Anyway, DN has been a great supporter of my book publishing endeavours over the years (They're +Displaced Nation or @displacednation) and I love 'em for it - which is why now that we have three books in the Levant Cycle, officially a 'trilogy' since I gave in to popular opinion, it falls to the Displaced Nation team to reveal details of the fantastic, limited time offer that's about to take place globally and in glorious Technicolour.

I'm going to put Olives - A Violent Romance, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy up for sale at $0.99 each for a couple of days before Christmas. This is clearly an ebook only kind of deal, so if you're wedded to print there's no bonanza - but if you've got a Kindle, Sony, Kobo, Nook or iPad and want to get three decent thrillers based in the mystical and majestic Middle East for under $3, this is your perfect opportunity.

For accountants and others inclined to autism, that's about $0.00001 a word.

The kicker is you have to subscribe to the Displaced Despatch to find out when the promotion is taking place. It's linked here for your listening pleasure. The Despatch is a weekly summary of book reviews, recipes and posts from the DN blog and actually a decent enough sprinkling of international fun and games in its own right.

As you're in the mood to go signing up to newsletters, you can also sign up to mine (link on the right hand side there - it's a bit more random than weekly. Let's call it 'occasional'...) which gets you a copy of Olives - A Violent Romance for FREE! So then you could get your jammy paws on a whole trilogy for just $1.98!

Oh, the BARGAINS to be had around here! It's enough to make your head spin!